August 30, 2012

TIFF '12: Amour

***½/****written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Angelo Muredda From the moment it screened at Cannes, Amour became the odds-on favourite to win the Palme d'Or, and no wonder:
Terrence Malick worked more or less the same formalist-auteur-goes-humanist
formula to great success just last year. But while The Tree of Life's cosmic
drama was hardly a stretch for Malick, you have to think Amour, which ultimately did cop the big prize, was a harder nut to crack for Michael Haneke. He was, of
course, first awarded the Palme for a thuddingly obvious Village of the Damned knockoff designed for people
who don't do horror. Would he prove himself human after all?

As might be expected, Haneke's
compositional shorthand--watch how he delineates the passing of time with
respect to who's allowed to sit in a given chair--is unimpeachable in this
two-hander about Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), a
happily-married octogenarian couple whose highly composed life comes apart when
Anne suffers a debilitating stroke that brings endless complications. What's
more surprising is how Haneke mostly steers clear of the intellectual gamesmanship
of The White Ribbon, where every
blonde child was a potential fascist, and every group of two or three a
nationalist lynch-mob in the making. Anne isn't extreme old age or death
personified here but simply Anne, whoever she is, or was. The past tense is the
operative one, insofar as her deteriorating health makes her an alien presence
in both the house and the film--a stranger to her husband, to herself, and to
the camera, which fixates on her blank stare in close-up. (That Riva was the
unnamed girl with a traumatic blot in her past in Hiroshima mon amourseems pertinent, an
incidentally critical intertext for a movie that's no less obsessed with her
face.)

This being Haneke, a more programmatic meaning
is admittedly also available: you could think of Amour as his rejoinder to
Hedda Gabler's desire for a beautiful death, which finds a surrogate in Anne's
wish, before her illness muddies her elegant self-presentation and good
breeding, to die peacefully at home, surrounded by Schubert. What lingers long
after the film, though, are the details Haneke settles on, so contingent as to
feel universal. Among these is a nicely underplayed image of a bedridden Anne
surrounded by bookshelves she can no longer reach--the casual arrogance of
bourgeois hoarding for prosperity undone in one stroke by the physical
realities of disability. Even more affecting and flawlessly executed is
Anne's first spell: Trintignant beautifully plays it such that George responds
to her remoteness not with concern at first but with hurt feelings, a sense
that his intellectual sparring partner of forty years has just changed the
rules of engagement without warning. Such unspeakable, minor indignities, the picture suggests, hurt as much as anything physical. Programme: Masters